Customer Reviews:
Wow how thing's (scifi) have changed..........2007-07-30
After you've read enough scifi you can start to get a feel for how novels are influenced by the era in which they're written. This novel reads like a cultural excursion back to the flower power era. Benford attempts to extrapolate the cultural aspects of the time (novel relationship triples, effects of pollution on health, resource depletion of the Earth, casual use of mind altering substances, etc...) into the future but completely fails to visualize any advances in technology (computers and the internet). The book is a not enjoyable to read, there's too much juvenile bravado and characters that serve only to echo the writers ego. Benford becomes quiet full of himself in the Epilogue.
One good thing: I have always been haunted by an episode of the Six Million Dollar Man (yes, Lee Majors) that involved a moon base and BigFoot. I vaguely remember this show as I was very young when it was aired. But after reading this novel, I have an idea of where the plot came from.
Ambition that exceeds the writer's ability.......2007-02-19
Entombed in this 420 page novel is a decent hard sf short story about Earth's first contact with robotic aliens. Unfortunately, Benford takes on the ambitious task of marrying his traditional space alien story with a literary story about human relationships and the meaning of life, a worthy project he is not equipped to bring to a successful conclusion. So, the interesting alien encounter plot is buried under hundreds of pages of tedious domestic drama (the main character, a British-born astronaut, has a menage a trois marriage, and one of the women is terminally ill) and political infighting (the astronaut is a Bob Dylan- and John Lennon-loving rebel who refuses to play the dishonest games of the warmongering bureaucrats and religious fanatics in the U.S. government.) Benford gets an "A" for effort as he unleashes literary allusions, unconventional prose techniques, and scads of metaphors and similies, and piles on chapter after chapter about the sex lives, religious beliefs, cocktail parties, drug use, day trips to the beach and vacations of the astronaut and his circle, but the characters are uninteresting and the only parts of the book that really work are those two or three dozen pages in which a character is in the cockpit of a space ship or Lunar craft. Too bad.
not great, but i couldn't put it down!.......2005-03-08
I hate the term "page-turner" but this book was just that. Even though I was never particularly impressed with the book, I found that I constantly needed to know what was going to happen next.
The future painted in this world, is suprisingly beleivable considering the year the book was written. However, the world is not painted as clearly as in a Gibson book, so a lot of it is left to your imagination. Usually I HATE when authors write foggy, unrealised future speculations, but for some reason it didn't bother me in this book. You can tell that the state of earth in the future is only a secondary aspect of this book.
The prose are pretty good throughout the book. At times it seems like Benford is unnaturally pushing himself to be poetic, but in the end it winds up being a lot better than 90% of the sci-fi writing out there.
The plot, while incredibly gripping, had some serious pacing issues. It almost seems like the events in this book could have filled three equally long novels. Now that I've finished the book though, I've come to realise that this entire book is like the back story for the next ones to come. It kind of stands on its own, but i feel like i would be jipped if I didn't read the next ones in the series.
Despite my criticisms, and I realise I am a very picky sci-fi reader, this book was thoroughly entertaining and worth the read. It didn't change my life or anything, but I have a feeling that it is all going to pay off in the next books in the series.
Old idea, poorly written.......2004-11-19
The premise of this book is certainly nothing new, and the writing itself is nothing to write home about. Benford spends a large number of pages telling very little story, with numerous uninteresting side-trips and distractions. He also frequently switches between present tense and past tense randomly, and engages in long run-on sentences with no punctuation or capitalization - this must be considered "cool" in some writing circles, but as a reader, it is a great annoyance. I certainly won't be bothering with any more in this series.
Better Physics than writing SciFi!.......2004-07-07
I really fail to see what all the hype is about this very boring book. It is a long, boring collection of misconnected thoughts. Since they are misconnected they never come together.
What is the final resolution of Alexandria being resurrected? That is never developed.
What is the point of the "new sons"? It is just an incidental group that comes and goes through out this endless barage of ramblings.
In my estimation, Gregory Benford should stay with teaching Physics, which I hope he does better than attempting to write SciFi!
Get a grip folks. There are reviewers that will aclaim ANYTHING!
I finally put this rag where it belongs...in the trash.
Customer Reviews:
jacket summary.......2006-01-28
from the back cover of the August 1987 Bantam Spectra paperback edition
cover art by Roger Bergendorf
2056 - Human and alien technology have propelled us into a new age of enlightenment. Moons are new communities, miracles are made not waited upon, the vast gooness in mankind is stretched further - along with the evil.
As earth itself falls prey to attack, from deep within the blackness of space comes an alien message of astounding importance.
It is a message revealing great wonders and terrifying danger. One man is about to encounter them both.
Please, please, stop!.......2005-12-11
As an avid fan of Hamilton and other great sci-fi writers, I find it difficult to plow my way through Benford's mess. The story idea is good, but Benford's writing is positively awful. At times he can't even seem to make up his mind what tense he's writing in. Initial charater development is next to nonexistent, and following character dialogue is somewhat akin to finding one's way around a corn maze at midnight. He uses what seems to be an alsmost experimental approach to dialogue, and no two are formatted the same. Sentence structure is immature and disjointed. Its either incredibly simple, or so complicated it becomes difficult to follow. Some character situations are wildly implausible even for sci-fi, or underdeveloped to the point that they seem so. I would not recommend this book. I am no writer, but I can recognize great writing and this isn't it.
Benford is king!!!!.......2005-08-11
King of run-on sentences, that is.
The problem with Benford's books isn't the story. This book, along with the first in the series, In the Ocean of Night, presents an absolutely fabulous story. Benford has come up with a really excellent idea for a series of books. The problem is Benford's writing.
For some reason, Benford forgets that "science fiction" consists of two words. He places much emphasis on the first word, but doesn't realize that it's fiction. Mr. Benford, this is not a science textbook!!!!!!! Getting the science right in a fictional book is all well and good, but if one can use the book to teach a physics class, then the writer's priorities are a wee bit skewed. If you wish to write a textbook, then write a textbook, and leave the fiction to fiction authors.
In addition to putting waaaaaaaaaaay too much emphasis on the science, the structure of his writing leaves much to be desired. As previously mentioned, he seems to have an ongoing love affair with the run-on sentence. There are literally whole paragraphs in the book which are nothing but one huge sentence. And you can forget trying to follow a conversation via the use of properly placed quotation marks. A quotation mark is to Benford what holy water and crosses are to vampires.
I give this book 2 stars simply because the writing is so horribly bad. The idea behind the story rates a stellar 5 stars, but I had to subtract at least 3 for Benford's pitiful excuse for prose. I actually feel that giving it 2 stars is a generous showing on my part, as I was sorely tempted to give it 1.
A word of advice to the prospective reader of this series: Read it after having a couple of glasses of wine. It helps. (Seriously.)
Excellent. This is real sci-fi........2005-07-26
In reading science fiction of all kinds for over 25 years, I came across the best novels in the genre and also across some real stinkers. I've been a bit disappointed with my most recent sci-fi reads and have resorted to research reviews at Amazon.com to discover some "sure bets". It paid off. I recently discovered Benford's Galactic Center Series and although I wasn't terribly excited with the first book, this one, the second in the series is beyond my wildest expectations.
The range of themes Benford explores in this volume is ambitious, but he still manages to deliver a page turner that invites the reader into deep questionings in topics from first contact, to exobiology, to sociology, and even gender issues. What I have come to expect from science fiction (specially in hard sci-fi) is exactly what Benford put in this book: a good amount of speculation based on whatever scientific knowledge is available at the time of writing. And to his benefit, he does it in a way that fits the story arc and keeps you wanting more.
The narrative is linear, but progresses in two different fronts. In one, we follow the discoveries of the Lancer spaceship, which travels the galaxy trying to find life, or the remnants of life, in planetary systems that show potential. What they find is not very encouraging and leads one to hypothesize that biological life has been systematically eradicated from the galaxy by some advanced intelligence. The other front deals with what is happening on Earth as Lancer roams about and what a lot is happening! Alien life forms arrive on Earth and start to thrive in our oceans destroying existing marine life and attacking also large ships. It seems two different populations of being share our oceans and a survivor from a ship that was attack tries to make sense of their behavior. Top it off with human, petty political/military intrigue and you have a plot like that contends for the reader attention on equal footing with the galactic exploration. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series!
Still one of my favorites.......2005-06-25
The best hard science fiction book ever written. Imagine that technology is viewed as a disease by a race of alien AI machines and humans are the mosquitoes (that spread the disease) that must be eradicated. Big concept science fiction.If you like Greg Bear, Dan Simmons, Neal Stevenson - this is going to be added to your favorite books list.
Customer Reviews:
Doesn't measure up to the rest of the series.......2007-02-06
The first two novels of the series were excellent, the middle two so-so, the fifth mediocre, and this last one would be completely dreadful were it not for the need to complete the series. The novel reads more like a disjointed collection of random adventures than a cohesive work. It's hard to be mentally or emotionally invested in a work when there's no rhyme or reason why anything is happening. I'll give you an example -- Toby spends part of the novel as a river guide... a river guide? why? it makes no sense. Usually I have no trouble visualizing even the most fantastic science fiction, but this one I found hard to take in the imagery. On the plus side, we get a large dose of Nigel Walmsley, the hero of the (excellent) first two novels of the series. The bad part is, like Toby and Killeen he's just doing seemingly random things. Like the 'esty' and black hole that Benford describes, the novel itself suffers from a disconnection of cause and effect. Maybe the novel itself was sucked into a black hole and spit out the other side. I really wanted this novel to be good, but it wasn't. bummer.
Not Terrible, but Weakest of the Series.......2005-09-10
Perhaps Dr. Benford didn't give himself enough time to produce the conclusion this series really deserved. The preceding books, "In the Ocean of Night" (1977), "Across the Sea of Suns" (1984), "Great Sky River" (1987), "Tides of Light" (1989), and "Furious Gulf" (1994) had set up a galaxy of humans, intelligent mechanical entities, vast magnetic beings, myriapodia and other varied aliens, complex astrophysical structures, some artificial, surrounding the galactic center, and the chaotic and uncertain "esty" in the wedge hugging the galactic black hole. Each preceding book had introduced fascinating new entities inhabiting the galaxy and locations for the drama to play out, but this one stayed within the final "esty", chaotic and perhaps infinitely varied to be sure, but somehow full of sameness in its chaos.
The new characters here are god-like higher beings hinted at in the earlier books - and their actions are really not well explained, except that they ally themselves temporarily with the humans against the mechanicals, to turn things around from the death and destruction wrought to this point. The "esty" (space-time or S-T) was specifically designed by these higher beings in the distant past to accommodate organic life and exclude the machines. This last novel journeys, at one point, billions of years into the future; it also finds Toby in adventures that echo Mark Twain's Mississippi river boat escapades, though here he is going uphill on a river of flowing time. The varied human settlements in the "esty" are occasionally fascinating, but as with the environment itself, there's a certain sameness that seems to stretch the novel beyond what is really needed.
We do learn more about Nigel Walmsley here, clarifying some of the connections between the first two books and the remainder of the series. And the mystery of why Killeen, his father, and his son are so important is resolved, though in a somewhat hokey fashion (does the DNA explanation really make any sense?) The conflict and contrast between humans and mechanicals is further elucidated: the robot/mechanical minds lack laughter, and wonder what purpose it serves. They see life very differently: their minds can be eternal, even as their bodies are frequently discarded and replaced with new upgraded models. In contrast, organic life starts anew with each generation; minds are constantly renewed and also constantly faced with their own extinction - is that the root of the difference? And yet the "higher powers" seem to have overcome these differences, though Benford has little description of how that could happen - and what exactly have they done with Walmsley, who is surely not the same as the original after all these years?
The end for the powerful Mantis is another long trek that seems sad and almost purposeless - couldn't we just get it over with? Benford does finally get to a reasonable conclusion; it's not a bad one, there's hope for the future. But compared to the other novels in the series, this one is certainly a disappointment.
Too many irrelevant characters. Too long. Too tedious........2004-07-15
Gregory Benford is a smart guy. It shows. The problem is when he tries to show us just how smart he is. This book shouldnt be approached unless the reader is armed with a Ph.D in astro physics. Benford introduces the concept of an esty, and although central to the plot and events of the novel, Benford does a bad job of making the etsy (is it a time? place? neither?) comprehensible to the average reader.
Also, the book isnt helped by the way Benford devotes entire chapters to events and characters, who are memorable only for the degree to which they turn out to be irrelevant. A very disapointing end to a very promising series.
Thank God it's over!.......2001-06-09
After struggling for months, I finally got through the Galactic Center "epic" (and I use the word loosely) by Gregory Benford. To say that the series was a major let-down doesn't half-cover it. I've read a lot of sci-fi novels, and I can't remember being that disappointed before, except with the works of Linda Nagata and Howard Hendricks (both certified 0-starers, IMHO). Let's see...
First of all, the characters are despairingly two-dimensional (make that one, for some). You don't know what they're here for and, frankly, you don't very much care. The story (or lack thereof) is strange to say the least: despite raves such as "no holds-barred adventure", nothing much happens, so that the books are marginally less thrilling than a 2,000-page financial report. (The focus of the story is a giant black hole at the center of the galaxy, and I can't help wondering whether that prompted Mr Benford to write books which are so empty of meaning. And to think that he needed almost twenty years to produce them!)
I won't even speak of the way a 30,000+ war against mechs (yuck!) is resolved in 3 minutes flat. I know it ain't over till the fat lady sings, but still...
Some aliens are interesting, but the story moves along and leaves them behind each time you think you're going to learn something about them! So tell me - why are they here? As filler? Hum. (For example, the best part of the series is, for me, the novella-size sea adventure of Warren in book two. But the aliens he meets are never spoken of again, and Warren himself disappears from the story after that. So, once again, what's the point?)
And the esty - a collection of places/times where/when one of the characters wanders for about 100 pages, meeting all kinds of people who don't have anything to do with the story. The first time is painful enough, but Mr. Benford does it to you *three* times in a row! A piece of advice if I may, Mr Benford: next time you want to write a book, please wait until you've got a real story, and not some disjointed ideas to mix randomly, because the resulting mix can be awful. And the philosophy of it! "The thing about aliens is, they're alien." Wow! OK, but once would be enough, don't you think? Why rehash it every ten pages or so?
If they awarded a price for "best disappointment of the year", this book (indeed, the whole series) would win it hands down...
...And then, a miracle happens........2000-08-18
This final novel in the "Galactic Center" set proves that even on a bad day, Benford can still whip out a fairly decent yarn.
Not up to his usual caliber, this novel seems even more disjointed than the previous few, and so much less lovingly spun than the "Ocean of Night" which started the series off. The changes in font are positively annoying, and the character development - or lack thereof - reduces the believability and likability of the people we're supposed to be rooting for. Particularly implausable is the dangerous, tin-man Mantis, whose mysterious and compelling behavior in the earlier novels is reduced to trying to find a "heart". I was sorely disappointed in this outcome, and I won't even discuss what a pitiful, sex-starved moron that Nigel Walmsley has become. It's just too painful.
Despite these and other disappointments, I have to give Benford credit for leaving this capstone open-ended, and providing the glorious, off-beat energy that makes his works so readable. I've never even written a published novel, and Benford has managed to pull together so much in this series, despite the reduction in degrees of freedom that the previous novels require to hold the story together. I can't help being reminded of Arthur C. Clark's "2010" where they somehow managed to change planets from Saturn to Jupiter. Sequels can be tough to pull off. We backed Benford into a corner, (or maybe he did it himself), and he performed well enough to merit a moderate "thumbs-up". I have definitely read worse
Customer Reviews:
Not Free SF Reader.......2007-09-04
Mechs are bad, okay.
A rag-tag fugitive bunch is trying to survive on a planet. They meet a group who have apparently cut a deal with the enemy to assure their survival. The enemy in this case being one of the Mechs. You know how this sort of story usually plays out, deals with the devil and all that sort of thing. Just not too interesting this book, as everything of course gets worse from there.
Haunting and Mesmerizing.......2006-05-13
Over the last 20 years or so I've attempted to read all of the great Sci-Fi. The first time I read this book was about 15 years ago and at that time I felt that it was the best Sci-Fi novel that I have ever read. Clarke, Hebert, Asimov, Card, none of them have ever written as original and compelling a story as this one. I recently read it again and it was just as enthralling as the first time. Buy this book!
The jargon is a little challenging, but it adds to the authenticity of the novel. Once you get the feel for it, will seem natural.
The plot is flawless. Man has populated the stars and in doing so, crossed paths with a race that is so advanced, man hardly rates a second look. Unfortunately, this species requires a dry, almost waterless world, so as a result, humans find themselves on the brink of extermination at the... hands?, of a heartless, ruthless species.
Constantly on the run, reduced to a mere vestige of their great past, humanity is again a tribal unit of hunter/gatherers, scraping out an existence beneath the... radar?, forced to utilize the alien technology to their own ends, man searches for hope on the edge of extinction.
Humans In Decline.......2005-09-10
This is the third in Benford's "Galactic Center" series, and the first of the novels to actually merit the name. The other books are "In the Ocean of Night" (1977) and "Across the Sea of Suns" (1984), set in the near future not far from Earth, and "Tides of Light" (1989), "Furious Gulf" (1994), and "Sailing Bright Eternity" (1995) set, as is this one, about 30,000 years later.
This is a time when humans have settled the central regions of the galaxy and have entered a period of decline forced on them by mechanical intelligences, robots who long preceded them. The middle two novels tell the story from the point of view of the
man Killeen Bishop, starting on the planet "Snowglade" where humans (heavily genetically adapted and plugged in to electronic devices) live as scavengers among mechanical constructions, a world near the galactic black hole's accretion disk. Benford's treatment of the human augmentations as something they take for granted and use with considerable skill is an interesting adaptation of "cyberpunk" ideas, though he does expend many words in the novel discussing the technical details.
Most of the machines ignore the humans or treat them as simple nuisances, but the terrifying, powerful and seemingly indestructible "Mantis" pursues and haunts the Bishop family from this novel to the end of the series, ostensibly trying to understand humans better, and in particular why they are so horrified by its sense of "art".
Another entity appears in this third novel and remains through the end - a "magnetic" life-form of vast extent, with roots in the black hole accretion disk and strands reaching to nearby stars. Benford's physics blends with poetry in describing this and many other wonders he imagines for the cosmos.
The character development here is reasonably well-done, though not as convincing as in the later "Furious Gulf". Killeen starts out as a sharp but unreliable member of the clan, growing and maturing as tragedy surrounds him. Benford seems to have a relatively limited range of primary characters: once again Killeen is the rebel, suspicious of authority and the good intentions of others, yet he ends up leading a band toward new horizons at the end.
It would have been more satisfying to have other books spanning the vast gap between the end of the second novel and the beginning of this one - rather that time period appears in flashbacks from the electronic "aspects" the humans carry, always showing nostalgia for times past. This leaves the novels rather open-ended (many threads not nicely cloesd) - but life is like that too. The breadth of Benford's scientifically plausible imagination in these novels is amazing in itself; read these novels to gain a perspective on life in the universe and what a sufficiently advanced civilization might do with a galaxy such as our own.
Great Sky River - the Middle of the Series.......2003-10-19
This was a great sci-fi book. Keep in mind it is also one book in the middle of a series of books dealing with the conflict between the creator and created. I would not recommend reading this book out of context. The earlier books must be read first to avoid confusion!
In this book Gregory Benford explores the human society that was so dependant on technology, that it became almost a magic art, a mystery to those using it. The basic principles of technology were buried in the distant past. When confronted with disaster, the survivors started looking for a "holy grail" of technology that would enable them to escape. A minor theme could also be how so much alike the mechs and humans were. However, at some point the human population stopped contributing to the goal of all life: survival. They ceased being "players" in the advancement of technololgy and so became prey. The book also explores how in any disaster, someone always "fills the gap" and provides leadership. The book explores the fight against an implacable enemy as well as dispair.
I read this story and straight away went to search for the sequel!
Mediocre Sky River.......2003-08-04
"Great Sky River" is hyped as a masterpiece of "hard" science fiction, and undefined term to be sure. I thought that "hard" meant examining true science, but this doesn't fit since the word is applied to everything from Arthur C. Clarke's near-future works to Frank Herbert's far-future "Dune". Reading "Great Sky River", I've come to the conclusion that "hard" means "complicated"; too complicated.
Imagine reading a fantasy novel. Now imagine that you are a person who has been living under a rock, and has no concept whatsoever of magic, dwarves, wizards, elves, or medieval times and settings. Everything would be fresh and new to you, making the novel very complicated to get through. That's a fair assessment of "Great Sky River" applied to a sci-fi world; everything is new, difficult, and challenging to the reader. My tastes are very diverse, and maybe it's been too long since I read a book from the "complicated" sci-fi genre, but I didn't enjoy this book as much as most people who have reviewed it here.
In the far future, a planet colonized by human beings has come under a siege. The machines have taken over, leaving a few bands of humans to run for their lives or face annihilation. The remaining men and women have banded together into clans, and fight back as best they can against impossible odds. These characters oppose the machines, but there's a problem: each person is also fitted with their own performance-enhancing machines embedded into their flesh, and implanted into their minds.
Once I got through the early confusion, "Great Sky River" seemed like it was going to captivate me. There are plenty of ideas from the imagination of Benford to go around. However... it just doesn't click with me. Example: each human is fitted with Aspects, which are microchips containing the memories and thoughts of long dead human beings, and their thoughts are transmitted to their carriers. The Aspects seem to be able to communicate with the enemy, and also come across as more human than their carriers. All good things. Benford, however, drops the ball, and doesn't develop the idea that these Aspects are more human than the living. The reader is left to infer this.
Sometimes, an inference is more satisfying than an over-descriptive dive into ideas like these; not so here. The problem is the author has spent hundreds of pages describing, expanding, and describing again (from a faux-historical perspective) the gadgets and gizmos to such an extent that it envelops the entire novel. The story gets buried beneath a barrage of technical mumbo-jumbo. As a result, the plot ideas are never brought to light. Most authors with complicated subject matter will create the setting early, and let the story flow once the essentials have been grasped by the audience. Benford seems to think that keeping this book difficult to the extreme is his top priority, but he lost me halfway though. I finished this book while waiting for a revelation that never came. I understood the ending, but by then I didn't care.
It is possible that my tastes have turned away from "hard" sci-fi over the years. I almost considered not reviewing this novel for that reason. Then I remembered the joy of reading "Dune" (Frank Herbert) and the "Hyperion" novels (Dan Simmons), which are equal to "Great Sky River" in complexity, but have an important difference: a compelling, human story featuring characters that live and breathe. Benford can be a fine author, as evidenced by "Heart of the Comet" and "Timescape". Try those books instead, and skip this one. I give "Great Sky River" 2 ½ stars, rounding down to 2.
Customer Reviews:
Not Free SF Reader.......2007-09-25
Robot centipedes aren't good.
Or, this book follows on from Great Sky River, with Killeen in charge of his particular group of chess piece clan human strugglers. Mechs, mechanical big insects, other people, pretty much it seems everything is out to get them, in general.
Not much different in quality between this and the preceding novel, like the other one, you will probably like this book, too.
jacket summary.......2006-01-28
from the back cover of the November 1989 Bantam Spectra paperback edition
cover art by Paul Swendsen
Set against the magnificent, furious backdrop of the Galactic Center, here is a drama as compelling as the towering Great Sky River. A small human band flees from a threat it cannot hope to match - enormously superior artificial minds embodied in great insect-like machines. This last remnant of humanity is led by Killeen, a man elevated to command in desperate times by his luck and daring. He manages to reach a new planet where he encounters vast wonders - a planet-coring cosmic string, an organic life-form the size of an entire world, another group of humans led by a strange messianic ruler - and even greater dangers from the most awesome beings they have yet to face.
Their battle for survival reaches overwhelming dimensions. But they will gain an unexpected ally. And they will contribute shockingly to the new order of life that is developing around them.
Physics Like You've Never Seen It.......2005-09-10
Author Benford is a professional physicist, and it shows perhaps the most in this fourth novel of the galactic center series. The others: "In the Ocean of Night" (1977), "Across the Sea of Suns" (1984), "Great Sky River" (1987), "Furious Gulf" (1994), and "Sailing Bright Eternity" (1995) also rely on his scientific background and poetic language, but "Tides of Light" is the one where he manages to put his hero on a classic free-fall trajectory through the center of a planet, a situation imagined in richer detail than you've ever seen it before.
The novels are grouped in two's - the third, "Great Sky River", introduces us to Killeen Bishop and his clan, human scavengers in the dominant central galactic machine civilization some 30,000 years in the future. "Tides of Light" continues the story of Killeen, now captain of the Bishop clan, landing on a new planet with fascinating new alien life-forms imagined in realistic physical and mental detail. These mechanically augmented myriapodia, large many-legged burrowing insect-like creatures, skilfully manipulate the most exotic physical element in the series: a planet-sized cosmic string. The myriapodia use their cosmic string to burrow through entire planets, extracting the metal-rich cores to weave artificial structures on the scale of entire solar systems.
Part of the fascination of the story is the state of the humans here - good at surviving, but fearfully low in skills and abilities, and filled with knowledge of decline from a much more prosperous state. Fighting not just the myriapodia and the machines, but fellow humans led by a despotic leader, Benford manages to couple exciting action with insights into human nature, singly and in groups. Sometimes the physics seems stretched a bit - how exactly would a planetary surface and atmosphere remain livable while alien beings repeatedly removed large chunks of the core? But the breadth of Benford's scientifically plausible imagination in these novels is amazing in itself; read these novels to gain a perspective on life in the universe and what a sufficiently advanced civilization might do with a galaxy such as our own.
Big concept science fiction.......2000-03-24
The "Great Sky River" series eschews the traditional science fiction device of portraying human beings as creatures apparently inferior to greater alien intelligences, yet having some indefinable superiority. How many stories, particularly as found in "Analog", have you read where humanity or an intrepid human explorer tricks superior (intellectually speaking) aliens by some sort of street smarts or idiosyncratic human trait ? Don't go looking for that smugness here. Fifty years ago John W Campbell challenged his writers to "show him a creature that thinks as well as a man only differently", but Benford has demolished the idea of mere equality in intellectual power between humans and aliens. The mechs and cyborg intelligences in this series are drawn as well as non-human aliens can be, their motivations and capabilities (as well as thought processes) are described without lapsing into merely "jazzing up" human characteristics. Benford's aliens are aliens in mind as well as physique and no reader can fathom their true nature. Benford's humans are hunter-gathers, appropriating technologies and materials they can not create themselves. William Tenn's description of humans as " rats in the walls" is carried to an extreme in "Tides of Light". Family Bishop merely dodges incomprehensible aliens and forces before fortune steers them to the next instalment. Benford has made an elegiac vision of the future, incorporating grandeur like Arthur C Clarke in "The City and The Stars" with a mysterious plot. The aliens are ALIEN and the humans are so different in physical nature amd cultural millieu as to be almost unbelievable. Strongly recommended.
Highest-ranking Sci-Fi.......1999-02-06
Gregory Benford is one of the few authors who don't betray science in their science-fiction. No Star Wars or Star Trek-like anthropocentrist grotesqueries in his Galactic Centre saga : the human "heroes", led and pushed rather than self-guided through our ruthless Milky Way, are little more than feral hunter-gatherers confronted to all-emcompassing alien plots. And this, even as they are routinely described as using technologies far beyond any cyberpunk gizmo ; in fact, Benford's complex and consistent characters face mind-staggering challenges, their own cultural inheritance being one amongst many. Even the classical galactic-scale plots found in Dune or the Foundation series are utterly reduced to naught compared with the (very) long-term projects of the past and present intelligences competing in Benford's universe. Now go and read this book, along with the five others in the series !
Book Description
Could Einstein have possibly anticipated directly testing the most captivating prediction of general relativity, that there exist isolated pockets of spacetime shielded completely from our own? Now, almost a century after that theory emerged, one of the world's leading astrophysicists presents a wealth of recent evidence that just such an entity, with a mass of about three million suns, is indeed lurking at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way--in the form of a supermassive ''black hole''!
With this superbly illustrated, elegantly written, nontechnical account of the most enigmatic astronomical object yet observed, Fulvio Melia captures all the excitement of the growing realization that we are on the verge of actually seeing this exotic object within the next few years.
Melia traces our intellectual pilgrimage to the ''brooding behemoth'' at the heart of the Milky Way. He describes the dizzying technological advances that have recently brought us to the point of seeing through all the cosmic dust to a dark spot in a clouded cluster of stars in the constellation Sagittarius. Carefully assembling the compelling circumstantial evidence for its black hole status, he shows that it is primed to reveal itself as a glorious panorama of activity within this decade--through revolutionary images of its ''event horizon'' against the bright backdrop of nearby, radiating gas.
Uniquely, this book brings together a specific and fascinating astronomical subject--black holes--with a top researcher to provide both amateur and armchair astronomers, but also professional scientists seeking a concise overview of the topic, a real sense of the palpable thrill in the scientific community when an important discovery is imminent.
Customer Reviews:
Concerning Melia's "Black Hole..".......2006-07-06
The best thing about this book is the series of photos at the beginning which focus in on Sagittarius A*. It is a little thin on theory (purposely); and at the end, he is a little too gung-ho about the ability of science to answer all questions. But in general it is an exciting subject and the author presents it very well.
Very excited about this book.......2004-08-27
This is an exciting book for just about anyone interested in astronomy.
First of all I'd like to express all my admiration, the book is really
wonderfully written, witty, elegant, always
crystal clear and never boring, a real pleasure for the
mind. Second of all it's a real surprise to see how close
astronomers are to actually seeing a black hole. Since things
are changing so fast, does the author plan on writing an updated
edition soon? It seems that a new edition would be necessary
in a few years.
passionate, he is - but it's hard to follow.......2004-05-09
Apparently Sgr A* is shrinking - at various points in the book, it's described as the size of Mars' orbit, the size of Mercury's orbit, and several times the diameter of the Sun. Then there's the "how fast are the nearby stars going", in units of millions of kilometers per hour in one chapter, and kilometers per second in another - unit confusion! It's an enjoyable book, but somewhat choppy in nature - he introduces a segment on Hawking radiation, then mentions that it's totally useless in detection for supermassive black holes. The descriptions of Sgr A* are well done at the various wavelengths and very helpful; the background on why each wavelength conveys certain information was particularly excellent.
Now: why go to Australia to look at the Milky Way?
Fascinating indeed.......2004-02-01
The subject of this book has been one of my abiding interests since high school. My daughter strongly recommended it to me, with the assurance that it contained one of the best descriptions of general relativity for the layman, woven into the captivating story of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Finally, someone who is directly involved with frontline research on this topic has taken the time to write about it in language that nonexperts can understand. Why is it that others don't do the same?
Amazing Detective Story.......2004-02-01
Hooray for Carolyn Collins Petersen, who wrote a review of this book for the January issue of Sky and Telescope. She absolutely captured the essence of this worthwhile read, and convinced me to pick up a copy of my own. I agree with her assessment wholeheartedly. Melia's book is a detective story, but more than that, it's an up-to-date account of what black hole astronomers are aiming for. The only thing I was somewhat disappointed with was that the last chapter ended too early. The subject of supermassive black holes in general deserves a lengthier discussion.
Customer Reviews:
Best of the Series.......2005-09-10
This is the fifth novel of Benford's "Galactic Center" series - the others are "In the Ocean of Night" (1977), "Across the Sea of Suns" (1984), "Great Sky River" (1987), "Tides of Light" (1989), and "Sailing Bright Eternity" (1995). The novels are grouped in two's - the first two concerning Nigel Walmsley and the relatively near future, the middle two Killeen Bishop and the far future in the galactic center, where humans are scavengers, and the last two Killeen's son Toby, and the conclusion of the series at the true center of the galaxy.
"Furious Gulf", the fifth novel, is both the shortest of the series and the one I found most compelling. Benford's flowery language can get away from him at times, making the other novels seem longer than need be. But it was also the real climax of the series - the Bishop clan heads straight to the central black hole, and there are exciting new creatures, artificial structures, and astrophysical marvels all over the place. The mechanical intelligences have been busy at the galactic center, and others have been at work there too. But the novel also works the best because here Benford's favored "loner" character makes sense for a teenager who's having problems with his father: the "furious gulf" of the title is in part the one between generations, a central piece of the mystery that makes organic life, and humans in particular, special in the universe. Toby also maintains a wonderfully portrayed friendship with the myriapodia creature who accompanies them. His internal development from boyhood is one of the novel's (and series') strengths.
Another "furious gulf" is that between the mechanical and organic intelligences, exhibited throughout the series but most explored toward the end. It's not clear where Benford finds such a sharp distinction coming from; it seems at first from a dualist philosophy like that espoused in Penrose's "Emperor's New Mind": a robot can never think like a person. But there are deliberate or self-induced defects in the mechanical designs that seem to be at the root. The robot/mechanical minds lack laughter - they wonder what purpose it serves. They see life very differently: their minds can be eternal, even as their bodies are frequently discarded and replaced with new upgraded models. In contrast, organic life starts anew with each generation; minds are constantly renewed and also constantly faced with their own extinction - is that the root of the difference? And yet there are the "higher powers" who seem to have overcome these differences, though Benford has little discussion on how that could happen.
There are other gaps - most notably the thirty millenia between the first two novels and the last four, a period described with fascinating nostalgia in the later books, but with no direct narrative. Sometimes the physics seems stretched a bit - in "Furious Gulf" one wonders how the "esty" can possibly sustain life with its chaotic rearrangements. But the breadth of Benford's scientifically plausible imagination in these novels is amazing in itself; read these novels to gain a perspective on life in the universe and what a sufficiently advanced civilization might do with a galaxy such as our own.
A dazzling and absorbing adventure........2000-02-28
Yes, the science involved here is impressive. The reason it is my favorite of the six books in the Galactic Center series, however, is a larger compliment. Simply put, it is the writing. Benford is a master of vivid descriptions that completely immerse the reader in the story. When you read this book, you will feel that you were actually a passenger on the ship headed into the unknown. Beautifully written, poetic at times, and totally absorbing, this one brings out Benford's talents to their fullest.
Great book with very suprising ending. Great physics too!.......1995-07-21
Benford has managed to put together a story that reaches
from the present into the far, far future and uniting both.
By exposing the desperation that future human beings will
suffer and endure to continue their survival, Benford makes
the future understandable to us today. Indeed, he makes
clear the powers and mysteries of nature, that human beings
will certainly be required to utilize if we are to care
and survive in our universe.
Average customer rating:
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Back to the Galaxy (Aip Conference Proceedings)
Stephen S. Holt
Manufacturer: American Institute of Physics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 1563962276 |
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The Center of the Galaxy (International Astronomical Union Symposia)
Manufacturer: Springer
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ASIN: 0792302214 |
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